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Eric Boutilier writes "Amy Rich has written an excellent Solaris Express (Solaris 10) how-to and general overview. It covers how the program works, using the community web site, and what's new in Solaris Express." Among many new features, the TCP/IP stack has been redesigned, IPv6 support improved, and both NFSv4 and USB 2.0 support added.

I did run Plan9 for a while, a REALLY REALLY technically cool system. However, the administration ellegance of the BSD's are unmatched, and I have used BSD for 10+ years so the things like remote TCP stacks and such never got used as I'm stuck in the old ways of thinking.:)

Darwin, isn't my thing, I'll wait for my PowerBook and run the real thing on it.

Linux, well, nothing against it. However, I'm not fond of the GNU GPL and LGPL so removed it from my list, though Debian looks like it is similar to the BS

Yes, becuase I want the freedom to do so. While the GPL and LGPL is designed to remove my freedom to have those systems.

For example, as a kernel and driver developer these are very important issues, it might not matter to you, but it does to me. You might not agree to this, but that doesn't really mean I'm wrong, only that we have different views on freedom.

Think of it this way: The freedom of speech. The GNU GPL and LGPL is forcing you to speek even if you don't want to. You might think it's good, and th

(In case the first post is modded down to hell, that's what it said:-)

The market for Solaris is very different from Linux, it's datacentre-land, not home user. I still don't see it lasting too long though... One of the microsoft lines that really is true is that Linux is a larger threat to Unix than to MS, at the moment (MS forgot the 'at the moment' bit:-)

Two wars: The desktop and the datacentre. Despite the cliche of fighting a war on two fronts, Linux is porbably uniquely positioned to fight a war on N fronts (where N is a positive, large integer). The way it's set up is to leverage groups of people whilst folding the advances back into the core.

SGI are turning to Linux, Sun will too. There'll be a few releases of both OS's first, though, IMHO.

> SGI are turning to Linux, Sun will too. There'll be a few releases of both OS's first, though, IMHO.

There is the same story with the Sun hardware... the Ultrasparc architecture. It is hard for one company to keep up with development of their own CPU's for long. The latest word has been that they have put new core's on the ice, and instead try to spinn on the ones they already have.

It is hard to compete with the main stream hardware, and at the desktop it's definitely impossible to beat x86 at best ba

There are rumors that Sun might join forces with Fujitsu Siemens, i.e. closer collaboration of the UltraSparc and SPARC64 design teams. This would seem like a pretty smart move - if you make your processor arch publicly available, you might as well try to benefit from it. Two independent groups developing 64bit sparcs for servers is a little wastefull, and maintaining an alternative architecture is hard enough.

Sun is all about throughput (bandwidth). Their biggest customers run heavily threaded workloads such as databases. Hence single CPU performance (latency) isn't as important. You will see Sun be a leader in chip-multiprocessing-- that is, don't be suprised if Sun releases a chip with 8 cores on it in the next 2-4 years.

There have been some rumors that AMD/Opteron is a possible position for Sun, but the practical difficulty in a 8-way and up machines with the Opteron is probably a significant limiting factor in that path.

The market for Solaris is very different from Linux, it's datacentre-land, not home user.

Linux is still a long way behind Solaris with things like NFS - massive speed differences. A home user isn't going to care much about NFS, which is probably the main reason why NFS still sucks under linux (though not so much in 2.6). I'm sure there's other things as well.

One of the microsoft lines that really is true is that Linux is a larger threat to Unix than to MS

I disagree. Linux is a bigger threat in server space, you have to remember that even after a decade NT et al are the upstart operating systems that have steadily been getting commodity PC hardware into server space - linux challenges that head on by providing a solid multiuser OS that runs on PC hardware, and does it much better than the steadily improving NT operating systems. You only run a Microsoft operating system if you want to run the programs that come with that platform or if you want to use cheap PC hardware as a server. Linux does threaten Microsoft in that way, and I suspect that has contibuted to them improving their software (security patches when they didn't care about them before, and the numerous new features in longhorn).

Note the following is my opinion, I don't claim to have all the answers or any more insight than regularly reading IT news...
The biggest difference (IMNSHO) between the open source community (including what is commonly referred to as the Linux community) and Microsoft is cultural. MS is a marketing driven organisation - features are chosen and development is directed based on what will shift boxes - even the current security initiatives are aimed at minimizing the amount of damage the reputation of the company was incurring due to its repeated and high profile security problems.
OSS projects seem to come in a huge range of styles and with a similarly huge number of objectives, however there is a larger emphasis on technical merit. Linus has a reputation for being draconian in what he will allow into the kernel, he is entirely willing to throw patches away that don't meet his standards no matter how wonderful the functionality they provide may be.
The result of this is that although OSS is generally not as "shiny" as MS products tend to be, it seems to be built on a much more solid foundation. Whether that is enough of an advantage for it to take a sizeable bite out of MS' market share remains to be seen.
Of course MS also seem to be their own biggest enemy. The new licensing arrangements and product activation seem to be designed to make life difficult for businesses. Likewise the way they seem to alternate between smear campaigns against Linux and running scared any time a business talks about moving there desktops over to an OSS solution has been raising the profile of alternatives to people who would not have otherwise heard of them.
Truly we live in interesting times (in both senses of the phrase.)

Behind yes, but not a long way, and the gap has been closing over the past several years.

I'm really looking forward to performance and security of NFSv4, but am apprehensive that the setup [lwn.net] appears to be more complicated than just editing a couple files in/etc.

BTW, given all the recent hoopla over Sun's commitment to free and open source software, they ought to be recognized for sponsoring the CITI group at UMich [umich.edu] that had a lot to do with Linux NFSv4, and for sponsoring the Connectathon [connectathon.org] series of conferences that I'm hoping will make my Linux desktop NFS client interact better with my Sun NFS fileserver.

In the datacenter for a good while yet. Several years, at least 3 and probably longer. Basically the hardware is better than Intel for the non sparcified PC clones anyway. Bigger caches, more I/O, more memory bandwidth etc. Linux isn't yet trusted on this stuff and it won't kill Solaris off until 3-5 years after it is trusted on the big iron.

I have no problem with Solaris and Linux side by side and neither do the management. We are actively and with prejudice trying to kill off HP-UX as soon as possible though.

Sun hardware can do linux and Solaris, at least. Even midrange Sun hardware (4800-6800, and smaller systems going forward) can be split into virtual independent systems.

I've worked with HP-UX, and the new hardware seems way better than their old crap (though it's hot and power hungry), but I don't like the O/S much. Too geared to their buggy sysadmin gui, and too flaky in the way it stores patches. I have repeatedly seen HP-UX boxes die to the point of tape recovery during patch installs, I've never seen a Sun die on patching, or reach as unrecoverable a software state for any reason.

HP support is really, really, bad compared to Sun, as well. The Sun guys know what they are doing fix hardware, and offer advice on software stuff. The HP guys have trouble with the hardware and flee if you ask about software (and no, I'm not just talking about one or two techs, it's a pattern).

I don't think HP knows where it is going in hardware or O/S, either. They've changed their minds a few times in the last few years. Intel, PA-RISC, HP-UX, Linux...

The biggest reason this cliche doesn't really hold water is because Linux isn't really fighting in the same sence of the word as Microsoft, Sun, SCO (not flamebait) and other OS-makers are.Linux, or rather the development of it, isn't based on sales and income. Linux development will (and does) go on without having to produce financial profits and results.

Sun for example wouldn't be able to produce an OS that nobody use. It just wouldn't go down well with shareholders, and would frankly be a right out stupid idea businesswise.Linux on the otherhand isn't dependand on one single company or entity. It's made by the people for the people. So it hasn't got anything to loose, and we all know that those who can make the ultimate sacrifice usually wins the battle, if not the war.

True, it is pretty obvious most folks here have never actually been in a corporate data center for a medium to large sized company.

When you see what these guys are doing with big boxes (Sun 6500's up to the 15K) you realize how much of apples and oranges this dicussion really is. Anyobody who thinks that Linux on Intel is a threat to this type of a market is crazy.

That being said, Linux is making a little ground on other architectures, but to be honest I haven't seen a single customer yet who is actu

Anyone needing more than 8 CPU's ? Seriously, go to IBM/HP/Dell and then try to configure a system that has the same capacity as something from Sun. When you reach the same specs, you will most probably have the same price.

The only place where Sun is really threatened is in the real low-end, and for that space they also have now x86 based systems.

Is the Unisys/W2000 a contender with Sun in the 8-32 CPU space ? Not really, because all W2000 processes run in their own small protected space, whereas one application on Sun can take advantage of all CPU's on the system if necessary.

"Is the Unisys/W2000 a contender with Sun in the 8-32 CPU space ? Not really, because all W2000 processes run in their own small protected space, whereas one application on Sun can take advantage of all CPU's on the system if necessary."

Explain to me, maybe I mis-understand. 1 process / thread on sun will only take 1 CPU. If you have a program with multiple threads of execution, it will take advantage on n number cpu's with a little bit of overhead.

Unless you have written your application to run in multiple threads, or forks...

Surprisingly, while a single application might not be able take advantage of SMP, often an expensive computer will run/many/ applications and hence take advantage of SMP that way. And the fork model doesnt cover a huge swathe of apps, eg apache serving a dynamic content site - lots of php/perl/whatever processing going on in lots of seperate processes, perhaps using a database backend (typically also either threaded or multi

Anyone needing more than 8 CPU's ? Seriously, go to IBM/HP/Dell and then try to configure a system that has the same capacity as something from Sun. When you reach the same specs, you will most probably have the same price.

That doesn't take into account that the current generation of UltraSparc processors (not the US4 which was just announced), suck in comparision to Itanium 2 and Power 4. Those companies willing to spend a few million on just one system, they want the fastest one.

Those companies willing to spend a few million do not care as much about speed as they do about their application being able to run on future versions of a vendor's processor with no recompile (and garanteed). They want to make sure that the OS they are buying with their million dollar setup is supported by the vendor for at least 10 years. They want to make sure that when the next version of the processor the vendor designs comes out that they can put it in their existing box; replacing the present processors or along side of them (without having to bring the box down). If raw throughput was Sun's only goal they could make Sparcs as fast as anybody else. But binary compatibility, open architecture, mix and match and endless support cycles for the OS is what makes million dollar companies say no to raw speed and yes to Sun. Oh and Sun's machines have incredible throughput and perform very well in real world scenarios.

Albiet that statement is hardly true for HP, as they try to move all their customers to either Itanium or x86.

IBM is in a much better position than HP. The Power 4 processor from IBM still maintains backwards compatibility all the way to their PPC 604e's. In the past, Sun and TI may have been able to make a good processor. Many people were eagerly waiting for the UltraSparc 3, since the USparc 2s had been suffering computing performance wise for some time. Instead of getting a processor that was compet

Glad to be aboard. I have long wondered what everybody else is on. You should have seen my jaw drop when I went to a local Sun event (mind you I had already been using Sun equipment and had been very happy with it) when I learned just how long they support their OS's. I also learned that if you certify you app on Solaris and a newer version of Solaris is released and ends up breaking your app, they will either fix Solaris or they will pay you to fix your app on Solaris

Tell me the application that needs more than 8 CPU's that doesn't cluster? I won't go far on a limb to say -most-, but a LOT of new applications that are being developed on the enterprise are web based, or using web services. These applications are a natural fit for clustering.

Database you say? Take a look at 10g from oracle, it's built from the ground to cluster. DB2 does the same AFAIK.

If your stuck running SQL Server, your definately going to have a problem... but , I have little need to run our

The current version of Solaris 9 already installs Gnome by default - it is not the "default desktop", but only because users have to choose it from a dropdown list in the login screen. I doubt that Sun will drop it again, after all the work they put in it.

IMHO, the Solaris Gnome is not too pretty. Some stuff doesn't work right, and integration with Solaris tools is not as good as it is in CDE. Of course, CDE is not the perfect desktop either, so the main advantage is that now you can choose the way in whic

I know this is a trivial thing, but it's a real pain in the butt to have to use ksh all the time because most Solaris boxen I've worked on don't have Bash installed by default.

The same goes for OpenSSL [openssl.org] and a bunch of other tools that would be great to have but that I cannot count on being there.

On the other front, having Gnome [gnome.org] as a gui readily available is definitely deserving of kudos. If only I had more than ssh access to most of the boxes I work with, I could actually use it. We have Hummingbird [hummingbird.com] Exceed, but it's such a HUGE pain to set up. Neither myself, a reasonably good programmer, nor any of the sysadmins at the very large bank where I work know how to set it up.

If you're not averse to free software then I suggest you try Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/). It's a lot easier to set up than Hummbingbird eXeed. It's also free. I've been using it for a few years now to get X access to remote *nix boxen, never had any problems cos it's easy to setup and use. And did I mention that, unliek Hummingbird eXeed, it's free?

There are two things that I particularly hate about cygwin. One, its package management. The interface for that is just awful and I'm both shocked and appalled that there's nothing for the command line to manage cygwin packages.

Two, don't even think of using cygwin for Win32 development for non-GPL code. I first got interested in cygwin because I wanted an easy unix-style environment in which to develop a couple of trivial BSD-licensed programs. Turns out, however, that the cygwin libraries are GPL'ed (not

Does this work as transparently as Exceed does? What I really want is a little daemon, preferably just running down in my task tray, that provides an X server. Nothing else. Let Windows handle the windowmanager aspect of it, and don't do anything with the desktop by default. Basically, just allowing me to run X programs side-by-side with my Windows ones. Oh - and share my X clipboard with my Windows one.

The last time I looked around (which was several years ago), Exceed was the only product that came

Does this work as transparently as Exceed does? What I really want is a little daemon, preferably just running down in my task tray, that provides an X server. Nothing else. Let Windows handle the windowmanager aspect of it, and don't do anything with the desktop by default. Basically, just allowing me to run X programs side-by-side with my Windows ones. Oh - and share my X clipboard with my Windows one.
The last time I looked around (which was several years ago), Exceed was the only product that came close to this. If Cygwin/XFree has a package that does the same thing, I'd be very interested in finding out.

Yes it does now, 2 weeks ago I installed cygwin on a winxp box, and it comes default with a XServer installed, configured to run in rootless mode, so it just uses winxp itself for the windowmanagement.

The last time I tried to do that (maybe one year ago, something like that), it was a lot more work for sure.

Is that on one of the Solaris install CDs? Or is it just available from sunfreeware?

A couple years back, I worked at a mid-size datacenter that used Sun boxes almost exclusively (Solaris 2.6 and 7), and as far as I remember, we had to manually install bash (meaning, there wasn't an option during install to install it).

I think it's on install CD 2, but it's installed on a full installation (SUNWCall). I also think it was added in Solaris 8, so 2.6 or 7 didn't have it. Solaris 8 also added gzip (thankfully) and a few other open source packages.

I know this is a trivial thing, but it's a real pain in the butt to have to use ksh all the time because most Solaris boxen I've worked on don't have Bash installed by default.

We keep a local sunfreeware mirror for new sunos installs. Bash, updated Perl with modules, wget, lynx, openssl, bzip, sudo, lsof, openssh, and ncftp. (no gcc) If it wasn't for sunfreeware [sunfreeware.com], I'd go nuts using Solaris. Anyone that has to move/push/alter data, needs common tools on all platforms, thank god for Sunfreeware.

Another relatively painless way to install lots of free software on Solaris is the NetBSD pkgsrc collection [pkgsrc.org] (what the other BSDs call "ports"). Like NetBSD itself, an important goal is portability, and in its case the result is that it is not actually NetBSD-specific and works on many other OSes, including Solaris.

The only drawback is that it doesn't integrate with the Solaris-native package management scheme, it uses its own database and utilities. It is also not a good idea to use it with the Sunfreeware

ssh access is all you really need to execute X11 commands. Install Cygwin and Xfree86 if Exceed is too complex. Then SSH in to the box, and check what your DISPLAY variable is set to (echo $DISPLAY). It should point back to your IP address (or hostname), followed by:0.0

if it is not, do "export DISPLAY=your.ip:0.0" and execute an xterm, or start gnome, or do whatever you want to.

my X network traffic is nicely hidden taken caer of by ssh; the Solaris box puts X traffic onto a fake local framebuffer DISPLAY like

solarisbox:10.0

before sending it back to my realbox:0.0.

It might be slower than what you suggest, but I think it's a lot more secure. Without ssh doing the job of making your X network traffic secure you'll have to worry about Xauthority. Too many people (and I was one once) get around Xauthority hassles with an

It's not a fake local framebuffer. It's just port redirection (tunneling, what ever you want to call it) over ssh. It's is much more secure (as secure as ssh itself) and it's probably faster if you're using ssh compression on a slow link.

However, in either case, there's no reason to do xhost + on the server. You could use xauth +server on the client, but you're right, that sucks too, because anyone on the server can display applications, read keystrokes and grab screenshoots. Also, DISPLAY=client:0 probab

Yes, they have bash and OpenSSL. Bash has been in at least the `everything' install since 8 (and probably smaller ones too, and of course you can always just add the packages), OpenSSL since 9 I think.

If you install the Sun bonus CD (? I forget the name, anyway its one of the ones that comes with the media if you have that, and you can also download it), you also get a load of free software packages including emacs (both of them), most of the gnu stuff including gcc &c &c, kde and so on. And ther

I hate working on linux boxes that don't have ksh installed. (Yes, I know some do, just like some Suns have bash.)

I don't really have a problem with Sun giving you the bare minimum tools. I admit it can be a PITA to install stuff, but if you're doing a lot of builds, Jumpstart should be churning out boxes exactly how you like them.

I personally don't like the way more and more stuff has been creeping in to the standard Solaris install, even into the core cluster. If I'm building a DNS server. I don't *want

Even inside a firewall, that's just begging for someone to step in and install another distributed.net node to their team.

It's trivial to get a remote root shell with rexec if it's running out of inetd (which I'm sure it is in your case). It's not quite as trivial if your rhosts is set correctly, but it's really easy if you have access to a laptop and a network drop in the appropriate location.

From the RFC it looks like it's getting there. Definitely better than NFS 1,2 and 3 but it didn't appear to specify the replication method or a single heirarchy which both lead to a bunch of extra administration.

AFS for instance, single heirarchy which is the same on all machines doesn't sound important but in reality it makes a huge difference when you can rely on the location of a file no matter which computer you are on, which site you are on or which country you are in.

Nice, Solaris is getting devfs support . . . just as it is marked deprecated in Linux 2.6

Solaris lack of change is one of the main reasons why it's so damn stable as an OS. They do not want to be like Linux where there is a new API every year. A new API or new low level things are not bad per-se but it's something else that needs to be debugged, something else that needs to be learned and something else that may not be compatible with current software.

DTrace definitely seems to be worth checking out. As the article indicates, more info is available here [sun.com].As the article does not indicate -- but it seems to be worth mentioning -- DTrace was introduced in a comp.unix.solaris post here [google.com]. Seems pretty damn cool...

Any OS that is out there that can take away from the 90%+ market share that Microsoft holds is a good thing.
Of course Microsoft's market share won't go down if this OS just replaces one *nix variant with another, but that's another story.

The register has an old story [theregister.co.uk] about the new TCP/IP stack in Solaris 10, that is good reading.

A quick summary of the story:

The new stack has:
- Efficient at handling multiple NICs
- Low CPU usage (30% lower than Linux)
- Build for targeting 10/100 Gbps in the future. Has a new construction where it is possible to offload the cpu by routing packet to dedicated packet processing processors.

The last part seems like a preparation for the Sun hardware of tomorrow.

that looks very usefull. maybe it's the implementation of this point from the article?

"Solaris Express is moving from always requiring superuser rights to a privilege-based model. The system now restricts processes to only those privileges that are required to perform the current task. This results in the vulnerability of fewer root processes and the reduction in the number of setuid root programs."

N1 Grid Containers is a breakthrough approach to virtualization with multiple software partitions per single instance of the OS. N1 Grid Containers make consolidation simple, safe and secure.

* Superior Resource Utilization. N1 Grid Containers dynamically adjust resources to business goals within and across the container. With little management overhead (less than 1%), it offers over 4,000 containers per system.* Increased Uptime. With N1 Grid Containers, applications are isolated from each other and from system faults. Using Instant Restart, each Container can be restarted in just seconds. Boot time in large systems can be reduced by as much as 70%.* Reduced Costs. N1 Grid Containers simplifies and accelerates consolidation. It also significantly reduces system, admin and maintenance overhead.

The containers (previous called Solaris Zones) can also each have their own root password and own IP address, as well as min/max/QoS resource settings.

I spent the better part of yesterday installing this thing on an old Ultra2 system. It's obvious why HP and IBM are eating Sun's lunch... you spend the better part of four hours installing the OS from the fancy new installer, cramming 3 CD's worth of stuff onto your system, only to reboot and find nothing was configured right, the drivers you need aren't installed, and none of the sexy stuff, like the Gnome 2.0 desktop, is anywhere to be found.

The Software Express site says that in order to use Software Express, you have to have an existing Solaris license, but I downloaded the ISOs a few days ago just fine without having to prove that I had one.

Don't know if your flaimbait was intentional or not, but you should have at least elaborated on why it's "god-awful". In my opinion, Gnome is far less awful than CDE. And although it is less feature-rich and configurable than KDE, its behaviour seems more consistent. That is what businesses and Solaris' market wants. Assuming that KDE is your awe inspiring desktop of course.

Sun's move from CDE to Gnome is a good move, if not from Solaris to Linux completely.

MD5? I prefer the support for BSD style Blowfish password hashes. Just set CRYPT_DEFAULT to '2a' in/etc/security/policy.conf

so while the old crypt style sting looks like this:Ely3JjNj4Vjz6

and the md5 hashes look like this:$1$2ZIvIsPP$GqZ5GnNFOm1rgklvylPmP0

the new blowfish strings look like this:$2a$04$TZ3DP5jgu9s7rbXTJ.i5P.lVl5HX1jWx3BRQ B8SkAr1 xKsUQIJIcK

(now if only i could find a niceacademic paper that discusses the relative advantages of each one)

I'm currently moving all of our systems from Solaris 8 to 9 and the support for md5 and blowfish in/etc/shadow was a very nice addition. (Not to mention the extra thread performance, better ldap support (no more nis) and a few dozen other things.

Sun keep the kernel API completely static for any particular Solaris release. When Solaris 8 was first released, there were no UltraSparc III boxen on the general market (though they will obviously have been running in the lab).

There were assorted hardware updates made as new product lines were rolled out, including all the Serengeti machines and the F15K, all achieved without kernel API changes. But I would guess that there was a shed load of API queuing up for the next Solaris release.

Hopefully they will get their TCP stack in order too. I don't have data for Solaris 8, but the TCP performance between 7 -> 9 degraded by about 30% on the same hardware. A coworker compiled a PDF [widomaker.com] that shows uniform TCP performance degradation across a number of different block sizes and socket buffer sizes.

> By the way, the insides of a low-end-but-still-so-expensive Sun machine are so-o-o cheap, like IDE Seagate drives... why do they charge so much for them?

I agree. Especially if it is something they call a "server".

Although traditionally Sun called everything shipped without a graphics card for server. Back in the Sparc days a sparc4 server was cheaper than a sparc4 workstation. Same box basically, but one of them didnt have the graphics card..

All that, and don't forget it runs Solaris, thus making it almost impossible to use.

I've been using Unix-clones (BSD and Linux, now happy with SuSE) here and there for almost seven years now, not counting my first brief encounter with a real UNIX on a mainframe circa 1990. I've also read and highly recommend others to read The Unix Haters Handbook [microsoft.com]. Reading it in 2004 makes one cry over Windows that repeated the same mistakes all over again (note where the book resides), and, what's more important, it clear

Seems like most people are missing one of the major points of having a Solaris workstation: development and platform scalability.

You can design, write, compile, and test an application on your little one or two-processor workstation. Once you're satisfied that it'll correctly calculate the national debt to 100 significant figures, you can copy it over *completely unchanged* to a 108-CPU Sun E15K and it will run exactly the same. Exactly. Just a little faster.

Platform scalability of that sort is not available from any other vendor that I know of. It's also darn nice when you've got a 4-CPU server that is swamped and want to upgrade to a 32-CPU box. You don't have to change anything. I know a sys-admin who once upgraded their machine by literally swapping out the boot drive. Not exactly elegant (and he didn't tell his boss how he did it so quickly), but it worked for him.

So, you're right: if you're looking for a desktop machine that'll run web browsers and still give you all the CLI goodness of a UNIX or a work-alike, you can get it cheaper elsewhere, although the difference is less than most people think. Have you priced one out recently? Really? Oh yeah, and the support is simply awesome.

> And when they finally got them here, one of> the V100s did not boot.

> That's it, we almost ended up with a> network-enabled FORTH compiler that cost us> $1500.

My friend bought a new car, and the dealership accidentally gave him the wrong set of keys. That was it, he almost ended up with a sealed glass and metal box that cost him $35000.

One little tiny, easily rectified mistake does not mean the product sucks. If someone dismissed linux because they bought a preinstalled box which didn't boot because of a wrong jumper, would that mean linux was crappy? No. Of course not.

> I'm still glad we didn't wait for tech support> to react (and I'm pretty sure it would take> them several more weeks)

Have you ever *used* Sun support? To answer your later question, that's one of the reasons Sun are so expensive. They have great support. If you were on a decent support contract there could have been a guy with you inside an hour with a bag full of V100 parts. If you don't need support, go with linux/bsd or buy Sun kit off ebay.

Once more, FUD-ish Sun-bashing gets modded up as interesting/informative. Replies which dare to defend Sun are usually modded down. Flamebait, troll, whatever. (They should have a "-1 heresy" tag.)

I have tried to. When I started my first professional C++ project, I bought Sun C++ because at the time it had the reputation for being the best C++ compiler available. Unfortunately, the license key they send me didn't work, so I was unable to actually run the compiler. I spend the first three month of the project simply trying to make Sun send me a working license. And, to be able to do something meanwhile, I downloaded and installed G++ which obviously requires

By the way, the insides of a low-end-but-still-so-expensive Sun machine are so-o-o cheap, like IDE Seagate drives... why do they charge so much for them?

I'm talking out of personal experience only. We have several SUN workstation that use IDE drives. Said drives tend to last years of normal everyday use. When one of the drivers finally croaked, we replaced with a $100 off the shelf drive (WD). It lasted all of 5 months. After that, we replaced with another off the shelf drive (maxtor, I think) and it